Yasha Lai M.A.S in Interdisciplinary Information Studies, University of Tokyo, 2023

Foraging calls forth a squirrel searching for nuts; countryside obaasan wandering the mountains looking for sansai. Does foraging only happen in “nature”? To forage, must we leave the urban sprawl for the mountain? Can we forage in the city, not in parks or green spaces, but in junk stores and secondhand shops? Might AI forage? What does it eat, that it might produce images and paragraphs and songs for us? Could we think of AI not as a giant conglomerate mind of inputs and outputs, but as a body in space that travels and trawls through digital forests and thrift shops, foraging and weaving into its textured, ever-growing self? By imagining AI’s texture, these artefacts question the assumed categories that surround it. Is AI built, or does it grow? Is it inorganic or organic, natural or unnatural, neural network or synaptic meshwork? Slide envisions a microscopic cross-section into what AI eats and how it metabolises. Strings explores AI’s form as a processual emergence through knots and twines with constituents that live before and beyond the weave. Patch challenges AI as a self-contained entity, wondering where it is situated and how it moves across sites of difference to connect, translate, break, mend. 

Photos by Yasha Lai, Alyssa Castillo Yap, Video by Priya Mu